“I like the driftless part of being a gypsy. To live a month here, three weeks there, five weeks somewhere else—freedom on the open road. I’ve been so focused on getting this dissertation researched and written. I’ve barely traveled around Israel . . .”
“Shall we stroll around the neighborhood here and walk off a few of those choco kar calories?”
“Sure.” Wendy was pleased with the invitation.
Uri gestured to the waitress and paid the bill. Wendy often offered to split, but he had ordered for her and seemed like the traditional kind of man who’d be insulted if she offered to pay. She asked if she could leave the tip, to make the gesture, guessing it would be rebuffed. He did refuse, as she guessed, but didn’t seem insulted.
They exited the restaurant to a spring day, the weather now fully temperate even as it was coming close to the crepuscular hour. All of Jerusalem’s residents were relaxing into spring; even the religious male Jerusalemites they passed were wandering the streets clad only in long-sleeved white shirts, black jackets slung lightly over shoulders.
“Mmm, it’s such a beautiful day,” Wendy murmured.
“It is.” Uri casually took her hand as they crossed the street. Wendy was a bit surprised; she hadn’t expected it, but it was pleasant. She hadn’t thought he would want to display affection for her after her breakdown about Shaul. And, it felt odd to Wendy to hold hands in public with a man wearing a kipah.
After two blocks, walking hand in hand, they came to Noga Frames, Noga Misgarot, the name written on the window in English and Hebrew. Uri knew this store often displayed art from students at the nearby Betzalel art school. There was a long bulletin board-type contraption outside the store, extending for perhaps twenty feet. It was covered with a sort of collage, of birds and clouds and stars, out of white paper, with a cerulean blue background. On its background decorations, it had photos and poems mounted along it at intervals. The effect of the collage seemed to Wendy to lend a new appearance to the stones on the building behind it. It made the stones seem stippled, with different shades of yellowish brown, like something natural, the colors of a school of fish swimming along in a stream, or of the water itself, undulating, the resonating patterns created by the light and its own movement. There was something alive about even the stones in this city; they too were participating in its activity, refusing to stand still, in the act of transforming themselves. The organic effect created by the variegated colors, like a fleet of horses running, fascinated Wendy.
Wendy’s gaze lowered from the stones to the bulletin board, and she and Uri looked at the poems, in English and Hebrew. Some were original works by students. Some were translations of poems from other languages into Hebrew, translations from Spanish of Borges and from French of Mallarme. English was represented by Emily Dickinson.
They dropped hands and wandered to the various poems and photos as they looked at the collage separately. Wendy read out loud Dickinson’s “The Brain—is wider than the—Sky.”
The Brain—is wider than the Sky—
For—put them side by side—
The one the other will contain—
With ease—and You—beside—
“I studied that poem in university. I love American poets: Whitman, Plath, Auden, Robert Lowell, Wallace Stevens.”
“Really? I wouldn’t have expected that—poetry doesn’t seem compatible with medical studies.”
“No? Poetry is training for psychiatry. I’m trying to get to the essence of a person, to catch the most salient details. Then I put that distillation in front of the patient, to show them, this is the narrative you’ve created—if you’re dissatisfied with it, let’s find ways to edit and change it. Where are the places we can add a comma, change an image, extend a metaphor?”
She didn’t know what to say next. “Uri, you sound like Atarah! I would never have thought of a connection between psychiatry and poetry.”
“The brain is wider than the sky—my neuro-anatomy professor spent the introductory class parsing that poem to introduce us to the concept of how the brain is organized. Poetry can infuse the ordinary with such beauty. The way Dickinson uses language, she just gives words, ordinary things, a glimmer, a veneer of extraordinariness. Here we are in Jerusalem, with this poem.”
“Jerusalem is wider than the sky,” Wendy added. “It seems to encompass everything sometimes, casting its sheen over life, transforming it to something beautiful. Look at those stones. They seem like something organic, creating their own collage in accord with the collage underneath them.”
“Like when you meet someone new, and feel things are changing in response to her presence, that poetry is everywhere when you’re with her.” He squeezed her hand firmly.
FOURTEEN
A New Chance
Yet even as the pilgrim thinks she knows where, and why, she’s going, the beauty of every trip is that circumstances are far wiser than she is, and she seldom ends up where she expected to. Her unseen partner on the road is serendipity.
—PICO IYER, in Traveling Souls: Contemporary Pilgrimage Stories
“Orly, hi. Wendy,” she said on the phone.
“What’s up?” Wendy heard a banging noise on the other line as a pot was put down. “Now I can talk, got those noodles done.”
“Oh,” Wendy sighed, “Can I kvetch? I just cannot get myself to start writing this dissertation. I know I have to just begin, but every time it seems like I’m ready, I come up with a thousand excuses. And then I am tired.”
“Get started. You know, what I learned about writing from journalism is that it doesn’t have to be perfect. What it does have to be is done, on deadline. The editor can deal with it from there. If you don’t finish, you won’t get paid. I’ve missed deadlines, and lost the assignment and pay, even though I’ve handed the piece in. If they can’t use it, it doesn’t matter.”
“I suppose I’m lucky then. I am still getting my stipend checks even though I haven’t started writing.”
“It won’t last forever—won’t they cut you off if you don’t produce?”
“I guess. But I am just so scared that it won’t be good enough. It is easier to not do it than to have to get it to the level I want it to be at. I know I’ll need lots of drafts but I want it to just come out perfect, fully formed and ready to go.”
Orly laughed. “Birth only happens that way in myth, Athena springing adult and fully clothed from Zeus’s head. Live births are messy, bloody, painful, through the womb, with pushing. It’s okay, though: all mothers say they forget the pain and discomfort once they see the baby. I’m sure it will be the same for you—once you’re done and have a job, all this anxiety will be a distant memory . . .”
“I hope so. If I could just be sure it would be perfect . . .”
“Kiddo, write the damn thing. The worst that can happen is that you will have to redo sections. So what? You can handle it. Believe me, no one on your dissertation committee can possibly be as scary or weird as some of the editors I’ve had to deal with.” Orly was in advice mode.
“I have to not be such a perfectionist, and just get that first draft out there,” Wendy said, knowing it was way easier to say than to do.
“When something is finished, it looks obvious and easy; the layout and word choice and facts cited are significant, the organization totally clear. But you—and your advisors—know that you have to bust your butt to get it to seem that way. The ease is an apparition, if you will, the specter of clarity hanging over the chaos of tons of research.” Wendy laughed and Orly added, “Do me a favor. Make an outline; have a sense of the narrative arc, what you want the piece to do. Then, put ass in chair. That’s it.”
“Amen, sister. Tell it!” Wendy concluded to Orly’s invocation to productivity. “Praise the Lord, Hallelujah. Hey, speaking of praise the Lord, I’m excited to tell you. I met someone. Well, I hope I did.”
“Mazal tov. Where’d you meet?”
“On Purim. I was wearing your grandmother’s shawl.”<
br />
“On the street?”
“At a Purim seudah. He’s a psychiatry resident of Dr. Hideckel’s.”
“A Jewish doctor. Oy. I’m kvelling. The nachas for your parents . . . your own personal shrink.”
“Love you too. He’s part British, part Israeli, has this great accent . . .”
“I wish I could meet a nice doctor instead of a struggling musician.” Orly began peppering Wendy with questions. “What does he look like, what happened, how did you know he was interested?”
Wendy sighed dreamily and lay back in her chair to luxuriate in the details of Uri, not even needing to embellish or exaggerate to arouse her friend’s envy. “He has blue eyes, and brown sort of thick wiry hair, a good build, really nice teeth—they remind me of a horse’s. Not in a bad way, just straight and neat and looking like there is good breeding behind them. He has these tender hands; he held my hand yesterday, on our first date. When we met, he was dressed as Hillary Clinton—a mask, women’s clothes—and he asked me, as a gypsy, if I did palm readings.”
“Clever line.”
“I read his palm, and we talked. I told him I was at Princeton. He got my e-mail from the department website.”
“Resourceful. So far, so good. I sense there’s something you’re not telling me,” Orly’s voice trailed off with a hint of suspicion.
“He grew up religious.”
“Religious?” Orly intoned with a tinge of distaste in her voice as she might say “spoiled fish” or “bacteria,” something awful that leaks and oozes. “What are you going to do?”
“He’s not super religious now. He held my hand. The funny thing is, since he met me at the Hideckels and I was dressed like a gypsy, long sleeves, long skirt . . .”
“He assumed you were religious too.”
“Yup.”
“So I have to stop calling you on Shabbat? You’re attracted to these religious guys. What’s up with that?”
“I didn’t know at first—we were both in costume. He was wearing a wig and I couldn’t see his kipah. But, people who are born religious are different from my subjects. He doesn’t spend every minute agonizing over what his rebbe would say. He’s open-minded; he’s willing to let himself have doubts.”
“Do I get to meet him?”
“Eventually. I like him and he seems to like me, but I’m the first non-religious girl he’s dated. I worry that he might decide he likes me but can’t be involved because he wants someone more like himself.”
“Maybe you’ll become more like him. People who say that if you study religious people you want to become one can be right.”
Wendy said in aggravation, “Stop! I’m so sick of everyone assuming that. Even my advisors warned me not to get sucked into the BT culture. Enough—not true.”
“You’re admitting you’re attracted to it?”
“Not at all.” Wendy was now at a decibel level just below a scream. “My dissertation is a career move. Why is it easier for people to assume that I want to be religious than that I want to have a career? It’s so sexist—women can’t be careerist, only religious. I can’t believe Orly, the crusading journalist, is saying this. This topic made the most sense for my career. That’s it; no more, no less.”
“Have a career. I have one too. I have goals—get a piece into the New Yorker before I’m thirty. Write a book by thirty-five, have a really good job . . .”
“But if you found a nice Jewish doctor . . .”
“I’d marry him and keep working.”
“So we’re in agreement. I called to tell you about this guy. I didn’t think you’d be so jealous—what’s going on with Nir?”
“Oh, he’s just depressed about his music career here and wants to move to London, and now I have this job writing features for the Jerusalem Post and I don’t want to move because I’m doing research on my book about immigration and my family here. I don’t want us to break up but I can’t move to London now, so I might have to.” Orly sighed heavily.
“I’m sorry,” Wendy said. “Somehow, I doubt he’d be happy in London, with fewer dossim to mock.”
“He’s lived abroad; he’ll be fine. But not all the band members want to; they’re still debating.”
“We’re trading; I have a British import who likes the approach to psychiatry here, and you have an Israeli who wants to do better in the music business in London.”
“That’s life,” Orly said laughing.
At the end of March, Wendy was ushered in to Avner Zakh’s study at home by his wife. Seeing this spousal devotion, she felt a pang of jealousy for the life he led. She wished she had someone so devoted to her and her work to ensure there was quiet, and time to write, and meals on the table. Being single and doing all chores herself—paying her bills, doing her laundry, grocery shopping on her own—was getting tiring. She wanted support sometimes.
Zakh was sitting at his desk, typing on his computer. When she entered, he gave her a big smile and said, “Wendy! Just a moment while I save this file,” and returned to his computer and made a few more keystrokes. Zakh had finally mastered the pronunciation of her name. She was unexpectedly pleased.
Though she had been to monthly meetings of the Fulbright fellows at his apartment, they were always in the living room. He had occasionally gone into his study to get a book, but she couldn’t remember actually being in the room. It had floor to ceiling bookshelves, filled with books in English, Hebrew, Yiddish, and German. She could see some of the titles: Tradition not Change: The History of Hungarian Jewry, After the Shoah: Ultra-Orthodoxy in Israel, and Dead Rebbes and Live Followers: The Success of the Bratslaver Dynasty. There were stacks of journals on the floor and a filing cabinet. Large windows behind the desk faced the little park Kikar Magnes, Magnes Square. It was one of the quietest places in the city, like New York’s Gramercy Park, a surprise of green and quiet one didn’t expect in a bustling city populated with continual buses and frequent car alarms. Wendy’s chair was a leather upholstered recliner. His long oak desk, probably twenty-five years old, was placed next to the newer computer desk. He could wheel his chair back and forth between the two, like toggling between the raw materials of scholarship on the desk, articles and books, and the means to transform them to a cooked piece of published work, a prepared dish redolent of details and ideas, all in their proper place, strongly flavored ingredients harmoniously melded into a piquant stew.
Wendy decided that if she had a tenured job at a university and a peaceful room like this filled with everything she needed to work, and someone to guard her from interruption, she would be happy.
Why had he set up this meeting? Wendy waited. He probably had to do some kind of yearly report on the progress of each student and needed to be sure he was meeting with her as he was supposed to. She was here, holding up her end of the deal with the Fulbright people. She was so privileged to have this fellowship, with time and freedom to research, no teaching responsibilities, but she wasn’t where she wanted to be in the writing. She’d hoped to have the introduction finished by now, but was still completing the literature review. She had thought that by the time she left the country, she’d have half of it written, and outlines for the other chapters. That was unlikely now, at the end of March, when she was scheduled to leave mid-June.
“So,” he said swiveling his chair from his computer screen at his side to the front of his desk, facing her. “How’s your research going? I was really interested in the presentation you made to the group last week.”
She looked at him and then bent down to tie her untied shoelaces. Holding her shoe and looking up from almost floor level, she said, “Do you want the good or the bad?”
“Tell you what,” Zakh said, picking up a sheaf of papers. “I’ll give you some news I believe you’ll find good, and then you tell me about your progress.”
Wendy, startled, had no more to say than, “Alright.”
“I’m on the board of the Lady Touro Society. We provide opportunities for academics from abroad at a
ll levels, graduate students, postdocs, and full professors, to spend time at Israeli universities and interact with their Israeli peers. It’s a reciprocal exchange, valuable for both sides.”
“Okay.” Wendy, still confused, had no more meaningful reaction.
“Since the deaths of Sam Handelman and Benjamin Margolis, Hashem yinakem damam, applications for the position are down. We made offers to the top three applicants for the graduate fellowship. They all declined. The quality of the applicant pool dropped precipitously from there, so I have taken it upon myself to find some other applicants, who I will then go back to the board to present. Would you consider applying?”
Wendy crossed her legs, fixed her gaze on him, and said, “I hadn’t thought about staying another year. I have a teaching fellowship at Princeton in fall. If I stayed, I don’t know if I could do my teaching there the following fall, while I’m on the job market . . .”
“You could finish writing the dissertation here next year. Then, the year after next, work on turning your dissertation into a book. The questions you are posing are absolutely splendid. No one has asked them of the newly religious and it makes so much sense to take your approach.”
“Thank you.” Wendy laced her hands together and said, “I’m still not sure what to say, but tell me some more about this fellowship?”
“Of course.” He relaxed his hands and handed the brochure on the fellowship over to her with a smile. “The society is generous—the stipend is quite a bit more than the Fulbright. You’d teach a course here at Hebrew University in the spring and attend monthly seminars where graduate fellows along with the postdocs and full and assistant professors present their work.”
She glanced at him. “Sounds like a great opportunity, but . . . being away another year. I don’t know how my parents would feel . . .” But then she thought of Uri. What was he doing next year? Even if he went back to England, Israel was closer than Princeton. They had barely started dating—should it be a factor? She added, “Can I see the application?”
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